Jose Saramago Quotes

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

All the scheming and plotting in the world won't result in something lasting, transcendent. Anything that's authentic, that's real, comes in the form of a gift. Even if by accident.

It would not be a question of censoring oneself, but of using common sense.

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard.

We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.